C’mon, baby, light my fire!

Delta Airlines from Raleigh, NC to Atlanta, GA.

I’m amazed the person filming that was so composed.  If I’d been in his shoes, I’d have been leaving footprints across the seat tops on my way to the emergency exit!

Peter

8 comments

  1. Much more interesting when you are a passenger on a piston engine Navy transport aircraft flying from Rota to Athens in '74 and:
    You are sitting next to the porthole at the starboard wing root.
    You see the inner starboard engine burst into flames.
    You hear from the cockpit area a calm, but very loud voice saying things like, "Full feather three, CO2 the engine."

    I have related the story over the years and once in a while somebody asks if I was frightened.
    I tell them the truth and say that until that moment I didn't know that you could experience things so scary that you wished you were only frightened.

    I was very glad to reach Athens the next day and go to work in the relative safety of the Forrestal's engineering spaces.
    I gained perspective, and a tendency to leave fingerprints in the armrests during takeoffs for many years afterwards.

  2. Commonly called pan fires. When it happens revving the engine a
    little to blow it out usually works. Sure beats standing watch
    with a fire bottle when jet engines first came out.

  3. I think someone skipped a step in the checklist and did not turn on the ignition before pushing the start switch. When sufficient RPM was achieved they moved the lever out of cut-off and when they realized that the ITT was not climbing they reached up and turned the ignition on, igniting the unburnt fuel in the jetpipe.

    Al_in_Ottawa

  4. To gain a bit of perspective on John's comment, The Forrestal was known as the USS Zippo. The story was they didn't have to have fire drills as they had the real thing daily. I was on the Sylvania tied up across from the Forrestal for a period in '74 and had thought the legend was just that. Sho nuff, they did indeed have the real thing daily during that week we shared the long pier.

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